SEO is something that every affiliate marketer on the web knows at least a bit about. Its something that has been part of the industry since its inception and it will likely remain a huge part of optimizing campaigns in the future. Of course, just like everything, SEO is constantly changing and your skills need to evolve with new trends to be able to best utilize it to your advantage.
Today we will cover some of the most popular, and upcoming strategies and trends that will change the way affiliates utilize SEO in 2022!
What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?
As usual, before starting with the main topic at hand we will cover some of the basic information about SEO that everyone reading this article should know.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a method to improve your visibility and reach through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Bing, and others. With the proper optimizations, you can expect more visitors, better traffic, and an increase in your general reach.
SEO works by optimizing keywords, backlinks, and your content.
Keyword Analysis
Keywords are special words that appear inside of your content that tell the search engine what that content is about. For example, if you are writing a content piece about SEO trends like we are, you might expect the keyword SEO to appear multiple times across the text.
Of course, not all keywords are alike, and finding the best ones takes some knowledge. Usually to find the best KWs you do a research piece on them. With this research, you try to find what keywords are currently popular and find ones that aren't already massively used so that you can use them to rank your content higher.
Backlink Building
Backlinks are a huge piece of SEO that most affiliates don't take seriously enough. These links to other websites link back to your site and increase the likelihood that your content is trustworthy and useful to the potential reader. Search engines love to look at these as they want to provide the best possible information to their customers. And if a lot of foreign websites link back to your website as a reference, then your words might have the right thing that interests their users.
Content Creation
Content is where SEO comes to shine. Quality content can help your pages rank higher and increase the likelihood of them getting more visitors and potential leads as well. Google and other search engines have their metrics on what makes good content and they aren't that well known. But as you might think, if it's good, they will know. Things like infographics, videos, graphics, podcasts, and newsletters can just help you optimize your ranking further.
What Are Some Of The Best SEO Optimizations in 2022?
Most tactics that worked so far will work great in 2022 as well, but there are a couple of things that you should focus on more than before!
Accessibility
Mobile users make up the biggest chunk of online users. Everyone has their phone close to them. Unlike desktops, mobile websites need to take into account that the user's screen is small and touch-based. So small buttons and things like hovering on specific elements just don't work as well on them.
For this reason, all engines prioritize mobile accessibility for their ranking. If your site loads quickly, is responsive and has an easily navigable UI, then you are already on the right track! In 2022 you can also expect to add features like voice commands, VR, AR, and other technologies to that stack of accessibility features that search engines love so much.
Semantically Related Keywords
In the past Keyword optimizations used to focus on optimizing one primary keyword as much as possible. But as search engines got smarter, so did the tactics change a bit. For 2022 a big change that marketers should take note of is the increase of reverence in semantically related keywords.
This means that search engines won't just look at the primary keyword you use, but they will also search for variations, and similar meaning words to help and better rank your content, while making it easier for you to create more natural-sounding content without focusing on specific KWs.
Google EAT
Expertise, Authority, and Trust, this is what Google marks as its core principles for SEO. Likely, this EAT principle will become even more important in 2022 and the future. With the explosion of content all across the web, they need to find valuable content that they can safely refer their users to and satisfy their search intent as best as possible.
Google does provide some quality guidelines that you should follow as closely as possible. The rules are broad and most of them make complete sense, so you don't have to expect some weird rules that seem to artificially limit optimizations.
Video And Image Search
The internet has moved far away from its simple text-only beginnings. In the last couple of years, most content on the web is consumed with the help of rich media like images, gifs, audio clips, and videos. All of these new and exciting forms of media and their incredible popularity mean that this content is more important than ever.
This is often referred to as visual search, and optimizing for it is already a big part of proper SEO. This is usually done by adding specific alt tags to your images and videos as well as optimizing them to load up fast.
AI Content
Artificial intelligence has changed how the internet is used and how the content for it is created. Algorithms like GPT-3 enable these computers to write cohesive and normal-sounding sentences with ease. This in turn can pump out quality content in mere seconds instead of the minutes or hours of human writer needs. Popular tools like Jasper (formerly Jarvis) and others and showing marketers that content writing might be a thing of the past in the next free years.
Google and other engines realize this and so far they are trying to dissuade the usage of such algorithms. After all, they don't want the web to be full of AI content that just rehashes existing content and rewrites it in new and “unique” ways.
It is estimated that Google uses its own AI writing tool to try and detect generated content and rank it lower compared to things deemed written by humans. How far this will go and how it will impact the internet as a whole is yet to be seen. But the thing that we can tell our readers is that using such tools in moderation should be fine.
These AI writing tools should be used for filler content and if you don't overdo it you shouldn't see a significant impact on your rankings.
On-Page SEO and Quality Content
As before, on-page SEO is still one of the stapes of proper optimization. Creating quality content should always be a priority. It will help you rank better and the users reading your content will likely interact with it more as well.
For search engines to rank your pages higher you will need to achieve a couple of things.
A high level of EAT (for Google at least)
Having a lot of content deemed high-quality main content
Enough information about the website you are running, including what type of content it hosts and what its goals are
A positive reputation amongst visitors
If you manage to check most of these then you should expect to rank decently, at least to what your quality is concerned. Of course, this is not the only thing that Google and other engines take into account, but they are a big part of it.
Conclusion
SEO in 2022 will stay as important as it was until now. You need to know that most things haven't changed at all and all of the optimizations you did last year will still be important in this one as well as in the future. The biggest change this year compared to previous ones is an even bigger focus on rich media like video, audio, and images. Other than that most strategies stay the same, which is good since we are incredibly efficient at optimizing for these things!
Do you do a lot of SEO for your websites? What are the biggest changes you saw this year compared to previous ones? Share your knowledge with us below!
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